US Govt's top 10 "Least Affordable Colleges"

bclintonk
Mon, 11 Jul 2011 15:11:23 +0000

ccreader:

Not to dispute the fact that colleges are expensive, but something about the list and study leaves me wondering if it’s flawed somehow.



Well, it has shortcomings.

First, though, I have no sympathy for Bates’ argument; it’s one of a handful of schools that deliberately impair transparency by blending a bunch of charges for very different services into a single “comprehensive fee.” I suspect, though I’m not certain, that they may be doing this to manipulate their US News rankings, which reward them for higher “expenditures per student,” but that’s not supposed to include room & board. But if they just charge a single comprehensive fee and can get away with saying all that money’s going toward the unified educational experience, then their expenditures per student go up, and so do their US News rankings.

That aside, though, here are my problems with the new government “affordability and transparency” tool. First, it only lists schools at the extremes; I don’t believe there’s any way to compare schools in the middle, i.e., the vast majority of schools. Second, as a number of posters have already pointed out, no one much cares what the average net COA is; what they care about is their own bottom line, and the average net COA doesn’t tell them anything about that. You could have a school with a high average net COA just because a large percentage of its students had high EFCs, even though that school was meeting 100% of need. You could have a school with a low average net COA that was coming nowhere close to meeting 100% of need for most of its students. I think just a simple table showing actual COA, % of students getting need based FA, % of students getting merit awards, and average percent of financial need met would be much more informative and transparent.

Regarding NYU: I think it’s a fine school and a good choice for many people, but probably the main reason it makes this list is that it meets, on average, only 65% of need for those enrolled students it determines have financial need, by far the lowest percentage of any US News top-50 ranked private university. And partly as a consequence of that, its students graduate with a higher average debt burden—$33,487 for 2009 graduates—than most other top-50 universities, public or private. It is, as someone said, affordable for those who can afford it, but those with financial need should be aware when applying that there’s a pretty good chance you’ll be “gapped” by NYU, so don’t get your hopes up.